There are various elements in a manufacturing process that can create what is considered “waste”. Such elements may include defects, inventory (excessive, redundant, etc.), over-production, over-processing, movement, transportation, and waiting. Additionally, there are costs that can be attributed to external causes such as cloning, copying, technology transfer, and theft (both physical and IP theft).
Also, at the heart of a wide variety of consumer and commercial products today is a System-on-Chip (SoC) where many features are integrated on a single silicon die. Manufacturers may use the same SoC in different platforms with various features enabled/disabled in order to differentiate the final products in the market. Unauthorized enablement of features represents significant revenue loss to companies.
Traditional methods of feature programming include: outright customization of the SoC silicon through different mask sets; the use of silicon fuses that may be selectively “blown” to control a feature; the use of jumper wires on motherboards; and the loading of different components and firmware per product.
The provisioning of features occurs in a variety of manufacturing locations whose facilities perform a range of production steps including wafer fabrication for chips, assembly, packaging, test, and system integration where components and firmware are integrated into a final product or assembly. These manufacturing locations are typically overseas and out of the control of the semiconductor company outsourcing the contract manufacturing to these facilities. As a result, there is little reason for the semiconductor company to trust the distributed manufacturing facility to manage the distribution and collection of proprietary and sensitive data such as feature provisioning commands, content protection key data, software/firmware code images, test results and yield reporting data.
Given the value such SoCs have, and the trend for semiconductor companies to outsource manufacturing, assembly and distribution of their products, several new problems begin to emerge due to the lack of trusted manufacturing processes.